#232 — Khalid — American Teen (2017)
Some things take time to settle in.
There was something about this one which kept sliding off my brain like water boiling its way across a frying pan. I knew one track off here, megabit ‘Location’ which was all over the radio back in 2016. Weirdly it’s not even the most streamed track here, with Young, Dumb and Broke taking that title.
Going from Mach-Hommy which might have a few million streams to an album that’s got two tracks that have clocked over a billion streams each is slightly startling, but that’s music eh.
Tough time to be an American Teen, especially if you’re a black gay singer from a military family in Texas. I was judgemental when I saw the tracklisting, the album title — the big viral hit. I’d mentally put this into a category of sub-Drake RNB from the late twenty-teens. That’s on me.
And it kept sliding off, like I’d get halfway through this nearly hour-long album and then have to pause it to take a call or do something, and I wouldn’t pick it back up. I started to feel like this one I wouldn’t be making it to the end of.
Then one day I was headed to a meeting and suddenly the chorus of 8TEEN was in my head. A few days later I was bodyboarding at the beach and the intro from Another Sad Love Song played between my ears as I waited to catch the next wave.
This is a very well-assembled pop album. It never quite goes off, but it keeps a steady pace of that mid-range pop music, and Khalid’s vocals are far more expressive than the instrumentation that backs him up.
But it took time for me to get this one, and a lot of processing time while I did something else, before I could actually appreciate it. Then I worked out he was 19 when this album was released, and suddenly this felt like a much maturer work and more of an achievement than I’d given it credit for.
I’ve had this on in the background as I write this, and I’m glad I took the time to actually let it soak in, settle and appreciate what’s in here.
Khalid — American Teen — 2017
Best Track: Another Sad Love Song. This feels like about three tracks at once, with a singalong chorus and breakdowns which feel cinematic. Hell yeah man.
Underrated Banger: For me its Saved, track 5. It’s hard to have an underrated track when almost all tracks have hundreds of millions of views. Khalids voice does the work, it’s a story of being left — and wanting them to call you back.
Most of the tracks from the album are here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NChtZCDCsY&list=PLzFiGv0Lsl7hLtHutbiceD3ZhJYx51vNo
